Norwegian Examples in International Linguistics Literature
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Norwegian examples in international linguistics literature An inventory of defective documentation Jan Engh Universitetsbiblioteket i Oslo 2006 UBO Skrifter: 32 ISBN 82-8037-007-2 ii Table of contents Introduction: The query 1 The result 4 Norwegian characters 4 Word level errors 15 Accidental errors 15 Interference? 26 Phrase level errors 35 Correct morphological form used in an incorrect way 35 What kind of Norwegian? 40 Written standards. The Bokmål/Nynorsk confusion 40 Awareness of written standard 44 Inconsistency as to written standard 45 What is Norwegian after all? 48 Regional variants 48 Archaisms 55 Atypical language use 56 What was the name of this language again … ? 57 Syntactic errors 58 Odd sentences 71 Absurdities 84 Incorrect interpretation 85 Incorrect asterisks 89 It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other 89 Interference at a phrase or sentence level 90 Strange assertions 91 iii Spurious references 102 Informants 102 Bibliographical references 104 Correct references 104 Erroneous references 108 Inheritance 111 From published information, written by other foreigners 111 From “personal communication” with other foreign linguists 113 From published information written by Norwegians 114 From “personal communication” with Norwegian linguists 115 “Transitive” inheritance 115 References (reviewed titles with defects) 117 Unpublished or non-refereed material 131 Norwegian characters 131 Accidental errors 132 Interference? 134 Syntactic errors 135 Odd sentences 138 Incorrect asterisks and other results of lack of understanding 147 Strange assertions 148 Spurious references 149 References (reviewed titles with defects) - not refereed 150 Other languages – a small sample 152 References (reviewed titles with defects) - other languages 155 Final observations 156 Bibliography (general) 158 iv Jan Engh: Norwegian examples in international linguistics literature * Introduction: The query The present inventory contains incorrect Norwegian examples found in the international literature on theoretical linguistics. The authors are all non-native speakers of Norwegian They are considered to be the authors as long as no Norwegian source is specified by them nor otherwise identified. Errors committed by Norwegian linguists that are quoted correctly by non-Norwegian linguists have been left out. On the other hand, errors made by foreign linguists when quoting Norwegian linguists have been included. The texts where the errors appear are all properly published and/or refereed, i.e. they have been published a) in linguistics journals, b) by publishers of high esteem, c) in reports from refereed linguistics conferences, or d) they have been accepted as Ph.D. theses by highly respected universities. For the sake of comparison, a smaller sample of incorrect examples from unpublished papers or non-refereed sources will be presented at the end of the report. Asterisked sentences have not been taken into consideration, since they are incorrect per definition. However, starred sentences are intended to be incorrect with respect to one particular dimension only or as far as one descriptive level is concerned, e.g. syntax. As a consequence, errors pertaining to different levels such as “pa”, “vill”, and “lose” in “*Hvordan lurer du pa hvilket problem Jon vill lose?” or “renst” in “*Jeg har renst ham (hans) bilen”1 have not been registered. Allegedly correct examples only containing punctuation errors have not been included in the inventory. Examples exhibiting all other types of errors (at character level, word level, phrase level, and sentence level, etc.) have been included - with the notable exception of examples simply displaying word forms spelled according to obsolete orthography or Dano-Norwegian. Such errors are basically the result of conscious political choices made either by the linguists or their informants, and cannot be automatically construed as anomalies at any level in the usual sense. E.g. “tyve” ‘twenty’ and “forsent” ‘too late’ instead of “tjue” and “for sent”. At character level and word level, there is a general consensus as to what is an error. Accordingly, errors identification is easy in principle. No theoretical considerations are involved. As far as errors at a “higher” descriptive level (phrase level and sentence level etc.) are concerned, full consensus cannot be expected. Thus, it is essential to adopt a robust definition for the identification of errors at any descriptive level, preferably one with no theoretical connotations, which are liable to derail the task at hand. As notion and designa- tion are intimately linked in linguistics, the author will refrain from the use of designations such as “ungrammatical” and “unacceptable” in their usual chomskyan meaning, in order not to engage in any futile discussion of linguistic theory. Additionally, the pre-theoretical designations2 “wrong”/”error” and “odd”/”oddity” will be used extensively.3 A phrase or * Thanks to Even Hovdhaugen and Stig Johansson who read a preliminary version and to a number of Norwe- gian non linguist friends and colleagues who were subjected to hundreds of linguists’ sentences during the query reported. 1 Rizzi 1990, 126n and Hoekstra 1995, 122 respectively. 2 Following Bach among others in principle: “Sequences of words that are claimed to be impossible sentences in a language are marked (---) with an asterisk; (---) question marks (---) will be used in an obvious manner to indicate questionable utterances.” (Bach 1974, 9n) 1 Jan Engh: Norwegian examples in international linguistics literature sentence is ungrammatical or wrong, when it is not considered Norwegian neither by the present author (a native speaker of the Oslo dialect and a regular user of the Bokmål written standard, with a linguist’s knowledge of other dialects) nor by members of informal panels of non linguist native speakers with a varied dialect background. A phrase or sentence is odd when two conditions apply: a) the sentence is considered Norwegian, although marginal (also in relationship to possible dialects etc.). b) Neither the author nor a panel of non linguist native speakers are able to imagine that the phrase or sentence in question will be used correctly in any situation. In an initial phase, all new foreign linguistics books purchased by the University of Oslo library during a three years period were searched. These monographs, proceedings etc. are supposed to be of the highest scientific quality and/or greatest relevance (although with a clear Anglo-American bias).4 In parallel, the electronic versions of the following linguistic journals were systematically searched for Norwegian material from the year indicated (inclusive) till the last number available by 1 March 2005: Journal of comparative Germanic linguistics (1997-), Journal of linguistics (1997-), Journal of semantics (2001- with the exception of 2001/1), Language (2001-), Languages in contrast (2000-), Lingua (May/1995-), Linguistic inquiry (1998-), Linguistics (1999-), Linguistics and philosophy (1997-), Natural language semantics (1997-), Natural language & linguistic theory (1997-), Studies in language (2001-), Syntax (1998- with a few exceptions)5 The material found was checked against the printed versions whenever possible in order to avoid formatting or character encoding errors due to the electronic media. Additionally, the printed versions of Linguistic inquiry 1978-1991 and 1993-1997 and Natural language & linguistic theory 1983-5 were searched, as well as the paper copies of Linguistic analysis (a sample of 20 issues 1984-2000), The Linguistic review (2001-), and Theoretical linguistics (1993-2002). The defective Norwegian examples turned out to pertain almost exclusively to syntax and typology.6 So, in a second phase, the library’s remaining stock of syntax and typology books from the last 50 years was searched in order to detect more examples, approximately 1500 books. No excerpts from titles published after 2005 has been included in the inventory. The result, approximately 346 excerpts 7 containing at least one case of deficient documentation8 made by 139 linguists under 167 titles, is displayed below.9 On the face of it, the result may not seem impressive, given the extent of the search domain. Yet, the number of Norwegian examples is high compared to the peripheral status of Norwegian 3 The two notions should not be considered as a strict dichotomy, though. Rather they ought to be regarded as referring to prototypical notions of description. 4 The University of Oslo library caters for researchers and students of theoretical as well as descriptive linguistics at all levels, including Ph.D. courses. 5 Evidently, the value of this particular query result is conditioned by an adequate indexation of the books and the reliability of the search function of the document handling program. 6 Very few Norwegian examples were found in the literature on phonetics, phonology, or morphology. They did not contain any significant errors. 7 Depending of the way of counting. 8 In fact, quite a few contain many examples each containing one or more errors. 9 Also displayed are several excerpts containing correct examples or contentions. These are, of course, not counted in the above crude statistics. This also holds for the sociolinguists referred to below in connection with the use of ‘code-switching’. 2 Jan Engh: Norwegian examples in international linguistics literature among the world’s languages and, most important in the present context, to the com- paratively infrequent references to Norwegian